Is Harry the Savior of English Literature?
Dear Polly,
Thanks for the tip about Sylvia Townsend Warner. I'll check the library for
Kingdoms of Elfin , which sounds marvelously creepy. And imagine
confusing a succubus with a lamia! I'm so ashamed. Five points from
Gryffindor!
I see that the question I lobbed casually in your direction on Monday has
bounced back like a bludger (or do I mean a quaffle? I'm still a novice at
Quidditch) to knock me off my rhetorical broomstick. Why Harry, why now? An
obvious answer, which we've gestured toward in various ways this week, is just
that the books are a lot of fun to read. Your analysis of their narrative
structure, by the way, was incisive. The sonnet sequence analogy is inspired:
With each book you become newly aware of the tight structural constraints
Rowling is working in, and freshly amazed at the dazzling variations she
manages. Each time, for instance, I'm sure that Snape is the link to Voldemort,
and each time I'm stunned when he turns out to be nothing more than a
garden-variety classroom sadist. And yet I know I'll fall for this trick again
and again, and that the moment I don't will be the moment his true evil--or his
unsuspected goodness--is revealed. I'm impressed with how effortlessly Rowling
balances the genre requirements of predictability--Harry will prevail, the
school year will end, Voldemort will be foiled (but only temporarily!)--and
surprise.
But as we know, a book's quality and its success are two different things.
Some of the hype about Harry Potter seems a bit wild: You'd think, reading
newspaper stories about these books, that they had single-handedly rescued
literacy in the English-speaking world, and also bridged the gulf between
parents and children. Talk about magic! Nearly every article I've seen quotes a
parent or teacher saying something to the effect of "My kid never showed any
interest in reading until Harry Potter came along," with the implication that
the kid will now trade Pokemon for The Illiad and our civilization will
be saved from the forces of darkness. The jacket flap of the British edition of
Prisoner of Azkaban sports a handwritten letter from an 8-year-old
begging Rowling to write more books. It's a bit much, really.
Adults who have children partake of a great deal of kid culture, voluntarily
or not, and inevitably develop tastes and interests of their own. I'm as
obsessed with Arthur as I used to be with Seinfeld. My wife, who is a
schoolteacher, has developed an insatiable appetite for young-adult historical
fiction quite independent of the professional requirements of keeping up with
what her students are reading, finding new texts to assign, and so forth. Part
of the fun of having (or teaching) children is the vicarious reliving of one's
own childhood--reading the stories aloud that you remember having read to you,
renting videotapes of the movies that enchanted you or gave you nightmares,
reconnecting with Ernie and Bert.
That Rowling's books, which are so smart and so bracingly British (I think
you're right to keep bringing up P.L. Travers as a reference point--she and
Rowling both manage to be at once subversive and starchy, anarchic and
commonsensical), have resonated with parents is no surprise. She quite cannily
sets Harry's adventures in an England whose culture and geography are entirely
literary. This is not the England of Tony Blair or Princess Di or Martin Amis,
but the England we remember from other children's books, an England somehow
perpetually Edwardian, notwithstanding certain concessions to modernity like
telephones and coeducation.
In an earlier posting you speculated that our enthusiasm for Harry Potter
may arise from our anxiety about technology, and it's striking (this is
something my wife called to my attention after she read the first two books)
how technologically underdeveloped the muggle world is in these books, in
particular with respect to information technology. No e-mail, no faxes, not
really any television or movies. And of course the wizard world is a world of
artisanal handicraft, ancient wisdom, and small, local businesses. Hogwarts
pupils don't buy their textbooks from Amazon.com or a Barnes & Noble
superstore but from a quaint old bookshop on Diagon Alley called Flourish and
Blotts. They don't have e-mail; they have owls. They don't play Nintendo; they
practice spells. (They do, however, collect famous wizard trading cards, which
move, just as all wizard photographs do. But, curiously, wizard photography
seems to be exclusively black and white.)
So there is a double nostalgia involved in reading these books--nostalgia
for one's own childhood and nostalgia for the timeless realm of classic
children's fiction. Rowling has cleverly, and subtly, modernized these realms
with respect to matters like gender equality and multiculturalism--not that she
makes a big fuss about such things. Of course, this being children's-book
England, there's still a servant class. But though there's plenty of cruelty,
corporal punishment has fallen from favor. (The death penalty seems to be
reserved for wayward magical beasts.)
Of course, none of this explains why these books have crossed over not only
from children to their parents but also to adults who don't have children. This
seems genuinely unprecedented, and it may be one of those inexplicable
phenomena the culture likes to toss our way every now and then. (Our seeker
ducks the bludger and sprints for the golden snitch!) Or it may be a symptom of
our present obsession with childhood and children--the simultaneous detonation
of the postwar baby boom and the fin de siècle baby boom. All I know
is I haven't had such a purely escapist reading experience in a long time.
As much fun as it was to read these books, it's been even more fun
discussing them with you. I'm quite dazzled by your insight and
erudition--bewitched, in fact.
All best,
Tony
